At a time when the state is struggling to balance its budget, failing to adequately fund basic road and water infrastructure and bracing itself for a potential economic downturn in the near future, extravagant projects like the bullet train simply do not make sense.

But none of this has stopped state lawmakers from stepping up efforts to spend the money made available by Proposition 1A, which voters approved in 2008, providing for $9.95 billion in general obligation bond authority to finance the system.

On Tuesday, the Senate Housing and Transportation Committee narrowly approved Assembly Bill 1889, a proposal from Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, D-South San Francisco, authorizing the sale of high-speed rail bond funds to pay for upgrades to the cash-strapped Caltrain system in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“AB1889 will help facilitate the expenditure of previously appropriated Prop. 1A funding on the high-speed rail system’s bookends,” explained Mr. Mullin to the committee. “That is including the electrification of Caltrain, a vital transit project on the [San Francisco] peninsula and in the South Bay region.”

Matt Robinson, representing Caltrain, which understandably endorsed the proposal, argued that the “$600 million proposed to fund the Caltrain corridor … will ultimately be used by high-speed rail trains as part of the blended system.”

Sen. Cathleen Galgiani, D-Stockton, who authored Prop. 1A, was notably skeptical of the proposal, which would free up $1.1 billion in bond funds to finance upgrades at both ends of the proposed high-speed rail system to make them suitable for use by the high-speed trains.

“We are far from having enough money to do all of it,” she said. “So the concern is that if both bookends are ‘ready to go’ and there’s nothing to connect them, it’s not a high-speed rail system. It’s not a system if we have a grade separation in Southern California, and we have Caltrain, and we have a stranded system in the Central Valley … then you’ve got pieces but you don’t anything that’s whole.”

Despite this sensible rationale for holding off on spending the money, the committee voted 6-4 to move the proposal along.

The bullet train sold to California voters in 2008 is not the project that might someday be completed. It will certainly cost more, do less and siphon resources away from things that would benefit the average person. At some point state lawmakers will need to truly represent the will of the public and help put an end to the bullet train.